Lee-Sean Huang

What are you working on?  

Professionally, I'm splitting my time between adjunct teaching and doing design/strategy consultancy with my company, Foossa. 

This semester I'm teaching undergrads intro to web design at NYU Courant. There are several other ITP grads teaching there too. It's rewarding to teach young people a new form of creative expression, even if I get the feeling that many of them were pressured to enroll by their parents. It's also nice to be making some money back from NYU after paying all that tuition for ITP. I'm also teaching at a masters program at Parsons in Strategic Design and Management. The class I'm teaching there is called New Design Firms, which deals with the future of the design industry/profession; it's part business, part futurism. 

On the consulting side, we are working on a service design project under the Design for Financial Empowerment consortium, which includes CITI Foundation, various NYC municipal agencies, and the Parsons DESIS Lab. We are working on designing ways to make NYC's free financial counseling services work better for New Yorkers. Just to insert another plug, if you need help thinking through consolidating your student loans, disputing your creditors' claims, or other financial issues, please call 311 to make a free appointment. They can help deal with both the emotional and financial issues associated with money troubles and refer you to additional social support services as necessary. 

What are you excited by? What do you want to brag to us about?  What did you try, and in the spirit of Red, fail at utterly and completely?

I'm excited by AI conversational interfaces as a way of humanizing tech and making it more accessible. My scheduler is an AI email bot. 

I'm also still training capoeira, and currently still working the acrobatics moves. I teach beginners classes if you ever want to try one as my guest.

I've also recently launched a creative side project with my best friend from undergrad, Griot Good, a food and culture channel with a Taiwanese-American slant. 

In terms of failure, we have had a few spectacular breakups with clients over the last 3 years we have been running Foossa.The bitter truth: trust but verify. Be vulnerable, get hurt, lick your wounds, and keep going on stronger. 

How do you find your degree relates to what you're working on now?  

I wouldn't be able to do what I do now without ITP. Without a masters degree as a credential, I wouldn't be teaching at the university level. On the design consulting side, the networks that I developed at ITP got me access to both gigs and to talent for teams I have built. Not to mention the skills to pull things off. FWIW, I was working in non-profit communications before ITP, and while I was self-taught in a lot of the web stuff, I really appreciated the ITP approach to teaching tech as "learning how to learn" and how to adapt to the recently possible.